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Bill Richards, one of the first no-tillers, has fields that haven’t been plowed for more than 40 years. With help from Jon Kinzenbaw (later the founder of Kinze Manufacturing), he created a 60-foot toolbar with a 24-row, 30-inch planter. He also headed the Soil Conservation Service in 1990, and operates one of the very few controlled-traffic systems in the U.S.

Richards doesn’t understand why more farmers don’t fully accept conservation tillage. He watched as no-till spread worldwide, while U.S. farmers inexplicably fell behind other nations’ soil-conservation efforts. “We were the innovators. Now Brazil, Argentina, Australia and Canada are ahead of us in percentage of land in no-till. We’re No. 5.”

Riding fields with Bill Richards is akin to a firsthand demonstration from Daniel Boone about how he changed the nation by heading West through the Cumberland Gap. Richards’ venture into the great unknown, like that of Boone and so many other innovators and explorers, born of curiosity, involved failure, experimentation and more than a little derision.

These fields along the Scioto River near Circleville, Ohio, Richards’ lifelong home, are a living record of his quest to make conservation tillage a viable option for farmers. However, Richards is keenly disappointed with the current acceptance of no-till in particular.

As a new Ohio State University graduate with little actual farming background, he experimented with planters and listers as early as 1954.

Atrazine’s introduction “got me ready to try something different with tillage,” Richards says. “I came out of college being told the only reason for tillage was weed control. Atrazine controlled the weeds,” Richards says.

A lack of row-cropping background opened his mind to new possibilities, after he married a farmer’s daughter and took up the trade himself.

He tinkered with toolbars and planters, sweeps, fingers and packing wheels. In 1960, he put together a toolbar planter and bought 6-row IH vegetable-planter units and added JD sweeps, along with shanks that pushed the previous crop’s stalks to the side. It was what we would call strip-till today, Richards says.

“In about 1966, I converted to an 8-row Allis-Chalmers planter that really got us going with no-till. They sold sweeps that were pretty much what we needed.”

By then, quite a few people paid attention to his oddball farming techniques. In 1965-1966, Richards planted 1,000 acres of corn with an 8-row strip-till rig by himself, with only one employee helping, an astounding feat at the time. That rig was an IH planter with a JD toolbar, lister sweeps, closing disks and packing wheels. In 1967, he put Allis-Chalmers’ newly released no-till coulters on the rig and added more rows, which truly got him going with no-till.

In the early 1970s, he visited with Jon Kinzenbaw, a young mechanical genius with a welding shop at Victor, Iowa, who later founded Kinze Manufacturing.

“He started drawing a new toolbar. I wanted a 60-foot toolbar with a 24-row, 30-inch planter. I put JD units on it.” That toolbar truly outfitted Richards to roll with no-till.

More farmers paid attention to his efforts. He began attending Howard Doster’s Top Farmer Crop Workshops at Purdue. “Using a computer to figure out opportunities made no-till look even better,” he says.

Discuss this Article 2

I agree with your point about economics, Charlie. But this story is a human profile series on Minds Moving Agriculture Forward, so we did stay on topic with his profile. And I agree with the complexity of this topic, so we try to cover all aspects of it in numerous stories throughout the year. Thanks for your comments. We appreciate it.